Political Scene: Will Obama Act on Climate Change?

Our elected officials’ inability, thus far, to agree on a sensible deal isn’t the only reason that it’s dismaying to watch the fiscal-cliff negotiations. There’s also the opportunity cost: all of the pressing challenges that are not being discussed while the budget hogs the spotlight. Not even Superstorm Sandy has been able to grab our collective national attention long enough for anyone to think about taking serious action to combat global warming. “We’re going in precisely in the wrong direction,” Elizabeth Kolbert says on this week’s Political Scene podcast. “[The Greenland ice sheet] is now melting at five times the rate it was in the nineteen-nineties. That has pretty significant implications for sea-level rise all over the world.”

Kolbert joins Robert Stavins, the director of the Environmental Economics Program at Harvard University, and host Dorothy Wickenden to discuss the domestic and international politics of climate change.

Away from the gridlock and wrangling in Washington, California is making strides in reducing its contribution to global warming. “The cap-and-trade program in California, which will come into effect in just a few days, on January 1st, is actually more ambitious in percentage terms in regards to reductions than was the Waxman-Markey legislation at the federal level that failed in the U.S. Senate,” Stavins says. And, even though California is just one state, he reminds us that, if it were a nation, it would represent “the ninth largest economy in the world.”

What’s more, other countries are also making progress in this direction. “The European Union is running a cap-and-trade system; Australia is starting with a carbon tax and then it’s transitioning, over the first two years, into cap-and-trade; New Zealand already has a system; South Korea, remarkably, is putting in place a cap-and-trade system,” Stavins says. “In the rest of the world, what is a U.S. invention—cap-and-trade—is now apparently the preferred approach.”

As Kolbert notes, we’ve seen President Obama overcome tough odds with big legislative efforts—just look at health care. But, she says, he’s fallen behind on making any meaningful progress on climate change. “He has so much catchup to do. It’s really painful to think of how much work he has to do because he didn’t talk about this issue for so long. You can’t just mention it once every four years and expect to have any support for measures.”

This isn’t just a question of feasibility, though—there’s also the matter of will. Stavins says, “I really don’t think the heart is there in the Obama White House, in the Administration, to focus in on climate change to the degree of sacrificing all the other issues that come under the politically very popular phrase ‘energy independence.’”